Gardens
Plants Plant plants that come back year after year. * Gardens-plank Links * Vacant Lots Examples Elsewhere Garden Goodies in NYC, Slogan: 'United We Grow! Our Gardens! Our Future! ' A Panel Discussion and Open Forum on the status of NYC Community Gardens was called to help decide the next steps gardeners should take to meet the biggest challenges. For more discussions see: NYC-GardensCoalition-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Links Media * Story from Seattle * Joe Grata's Garden Talk about crop yield -- how my garden grows from Saturday, November 13, 2004 * Plant ideas in PG as part of Penn State Univ. Cooperative Extension at North and South Parks. Why not any in the city? Other Organizations * American Public Gardens Assn The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values, Text Source: NYU, Law and Economics Research Paper No. 06-09 of VICKI BEEN, Co-Author: IOAN VOICU of NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy Cities across the United States increasingly are debating the best way to use vacant infill lots. The community garden movement is one of the major contenders for the space, as are advocates for small public pocket parks and other green spaces. To allocate the land most efficiently and fairly, local governments need sound research about the value of such gardens and parks to their host communities. At the same time, cities are looking for new ways of financing the development and maintenance of public garden and park space. Some have turned to tax increment financing to generate resources, other are introducing impact fees or special assessments to cover the costs of urban parks. In order to employ such financing mechanisms, both policy concerns and legal constraints require local governments to base their charges on sound data about the impacts green spaces have on the value of the neighboring properties that would be forced to bear the incidence of the tax or fee. Despite the clear public policy need for such data, our knowledge about the impacts community gardens and other such spaces have on surrounding neighborhoods is quite limited. No studies have focused specifically on community gardens, and those that have examined the property value impacts of parks and other open space are cross-sectional studies inattentive to when the park opened, so that it is impossible to determine the direction of the causality of any property value differences found. The existing literature also has paid insufficient attention to qualitative differences among the parks studied and to differences in characteristics of the surrounding neighborhoods that might affect the parks' impacts. Applying hedonic methods to a unique data set of all property sales in New York City over several decades, we compared the prices of properties within a given distance of community gardens to prices of comparable properties outside the designated ring, but still located in the same neighborhood. By examining whether and how this difference changed once a community garden was established, we account for any systematic differences between the sites used for community gardens and other land in the neighborhood, thus resolving questions about the direction of causality and helping to disentangle the specific effects of community gardens from other contemporaneous changes occurring across neighborhoods and properties in the city. We find that the opening of a community garden has a statistically significant positive impact on residential properties within 1000 feet of the garden, and that the impact increases over time. We find that gardens have the greatest impact in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Higher quality gardens have the greatest positive impact. Finally, we find that the opening of a garden is associated with other changes in the neighborhood, such as increasing rates of homeownership, and thus may be serving as catalysts for economic redevelopment of the community. Another Study: The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values Seeing Green: Study Finds Greening is a Good Investment Strategy for a Green City, Summer 2005 Advocates of urban greening often promote the intangible benefits that open space provides, such as improving the quality of city life and fostering a sense of community pride. While these benefits are difficult to quantify, a ground-breaking study from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania now offers solid evidence that investment in greening yields significant economic returns, specifically, dramatic increases in real estate values. Funded by the William Penn Foundation, The Determinants of Neighborhood Transformation in Philadelphia: Identification and Analysis—The New Kensington Pilot Study, was developed and produced by Susan Wachter, professor of real estate, finance, and city and regional planning at the Wharton School. It looked at the economic impact of "place-based investment strategies," particularly the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's seven-year greening effort in the New Kensington area of North Philadelphia. "We were always convinced that greening has a tremendously positive impact on communities," says J. Blaine Bonham, Jr., executive vice president of PHS. "The success of our Philadelphia Green program has demonstrated this. Now, the Wharton findings begin to quantify the positive return on the investment in greening." From 1995 through 2002, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's Philadelphia Green program worked in partnership with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC) to address the blight caused by more than 1,100 parcels of abandoned land in the neighborhood and to come up with a vacant-land management plan for the community. The goal was to improve the area's appearance and help stem population loss, attract new residents, and encourage reinvestment. The partners created a comprehensive greening program, funded largely by the city's Office of Housing and Community Development, with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the William Penn Foundation. The strategy included "stabilizing" vacant lots (clearing debris and installing fencing and trees), creating community gardens, planting trees, renovating parks, and transferring vacant lots to adjacent homeowners for private use. The results of the PHS-NKCDC partnership include 480 newly planted trees, 145 settled side yards, 217 stabilized lots, and 15 community gardens. Wachter's team utilized new technology and economic models to measure the impact of greening as accurately as possible, adjusting for other factors that affect real estate values, such as varying characteristics of individual homes and proximity to public transportation and schools. Sales information and other real estate data came from Philadelphia's Board of Revision of Taxes, while NKCDC and PHS provided information on greening projects in the area. The study incorporates sales records on thousands of homes and more than 50 variables. To analyze the relationship between greening investments and house values, the Wharton School's Geographic Information Systems laboratory created a special database that included the location and timing of greening projects. The study found significant increases in the value of individual homes near cleaned lots, streets trees, and parks (see sidebar). It also found a considerable increase in the total value of property in the community. According to Wachter, tree plantings alone account for a total increase of about $4 million, while lot improvements increased the total value by $12 million. Key Findings of the Wharton School Study * Cleaning and greening of vacant lots can increase adjacent property values by as much as 30%. * Planting a tree within 50 feet of a house can increase its value by about 9%. * Location of a house within 1/4 mile from a park increased values by 10%. * Neighborhood blocks with higher concentrations of unmanaged vacant lots displayed lower house prices, about 18%. Category:Wellness